Competition forcing grant seekers to get creative

University of Rhode Island professor Norbert Mundorf admittedly knows very little about how to design a bridge, build a highway or assemble a better car engine. Yet he’s won three grants from the university’s Transportation Center, which is preparing to award $463,400 in federal money for research projects, and he is looking for more.
Mundorf hopes for $60,000 from the federal appropriation to study ways to persuade state employees to take public transportation or carpool in hopes of reducing congestion and greenhouse gas emissions. He is one of many researchers looking to mold their projects to fit themes around increasingly scarce grant dollars. A good way to do that, Mundorf said, is to fuse research from various academic areas.
“Interdisciplinary work is the key because if you can generate these synergies into different disciplines, not only will the research be better but you can tap into different funding sources,” he said.
Mundorf has had success following that rule. In the past, the Transportation Center awarded him money to study how to encourage high school students to wear seat belts, the effects of distance learning on transportation and drunken-driving prevention incentives.
Transportation Center Director Deborah Rosen said researchers for years have sought to package proposals in a way that they could qualify for various grants. But the Great Recession hurt grant organizations badly and sent researchers digging a little deeper to find connections between their beloved projects and the organization’s areas of interest.
“Sometimes it works and sometimes it’s not easily recognized by the review committee as being a good fit,” Rosen said.
Back when the late John Chafee was a senior senator in Congress and fewer university transportation centers existed, the URI center had plenty of money. At one point the center received about $1.8 million a year in federal earmarks and handed out eye-popping grants of $250,000 for a single research project. More recently, the annual federal appropriation, which is set by Congress and not based on a formula or competition, has hovered around $450,000. The size of the largest grants has shrunk to approximately $100,000, Rosen said.
And in what may seem counter-intuitive, the number of proposals submitted to the center has fallen. Less to give means smaller awards and keeps some people away, Rosen said. This year the center’s review committee received about 20 “problem statements” that will be combined with some received by the R.I. Department of Transportation. All told, Rosen expects the group to receive about 30 requests, ask 10 to turn their requests into full proposals and then fund approximately five.
A critical part of the multilayered review will be whether the researcher can demonstrate real-life applicability. The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Research and Innovative Technology Administration, which oversees 67 university centers around the nation, wants to see the wheel of innovation where the rubber meets road.
“You want to know at the end of the day something useful comes out of this,” Rosen said.
The university filters requests for grants first through a six- or seven-member review team, then studies the finalists further before recommending a group to the center’s nine-member executive board. At each step, university administrators and faculty, outside academics, federal and state officials and business leaders review the applications. And they favor applications where at least one lead researcher comes from the university’s faculty.
“We want to be fully engaged and make sure our faculty is … as well,” said Phillip Kydd, who sits on the center’s board. But Kydd, the assistant director at the DOT, said the center also encourages partnerships with other schools to provide regional, national or even international views of emerging transportation issues. And one partnership often exercised is the close relationship between the agency and the university center.
Kydd said the DOT, in a time of tight budgets, has sought to coordinate its in-house research with that at the center to better leverage limited money and expertise. It also helps the DOT peer into the future of the transportation industry, while providing students in the field hands-on research opportunities in preparation for a career with the DOT or one of its hundreds of contractors.
“It helps us start to think about succession planning,” Kydd said. “What are we going to look like five or 10 years from now as an industry and who will be that new transportation professional?”
Michael Greenfield, an associate professor of chemical engineering at URI, said it was seed money from the center that put him on the road to become a national expert in the molecular structure of roadway asphalt. Seven years ago the Transportation Center and DOT jointly awarded him about $70,000 for some basic research.
In February, the Federal Highway Administration invited him to speak at a conference in California about his work, after inviting the professor to present at a conference in Texas in September. Greenfield said much to his surprise he is now considered an expert on computational research as it relates to modules in roadway asphalt. But Kydd called it the expected result.
“I think that’s the ultimate goal where we can transition some things into practical applications,” Kydd said. •